At some insane hour this morning, the first milestone of Project Indiana, was made publicly available. Whilst this isn't the official release of Project Indiana, it does give you a very good idea of what to expect when it is released.

To quote the OpenSolaris forum announcement:


This is an x86-based LiveCD install image, containing some new and emerging OpenSolaris technologies. This may result in instabilities that lead to system panics or data corruption.

Among the features contained in this release are

  • Single CD download, with LiveCD 'try before you install' capabilities
  • Caiman installer, with significantly improved installation experience
  • ZFS as the default filesystem
  • Image packaging system, with capabilities to pull packages from network repositories
  • GNU utilities in the default $PATH
  • bash as the default shell
  • GNOME 2.20 desktop environment

So, if you keen on seeing what Project Indiana is all about, go grab a copy of the ISO and start testing. If you hit a bug, report it - remember, if you don't report a bug for a problem, no matter how small, it won't ever be fixed.

After you have installed the OpenSolaris OS on your system, try out some of the new functionality including downloading and installing applications using the new IPS (think apt-get) or roll your own OpenSolaris distro using the Distribution Constructor Toolkit.